The Sacromonte Collection — An Open Dossier on the Lead Books, the Torre Turpiana Parchment & the Mute Book

740 manuscripts · 13,979 folios · 0 transcribed

In 1588, workers demolishing the old minaret of Granada's main mosque — by then the city's cathedral — found a lead-lined box containing a parchment in Latin, Arabic and Castilian, a bone fragment, and a piece of cloth associated with the Virgin Mary. Seven years later, on the wooded hill that came to be called Sacromonte, treasure-seekers began unearthing twenty-two circular lead tablets engraved in a singular Arabic script. The texts presented themselves as the earliest Christian gospels, written by Arab disciples of Saint James, and they affirmed that Arabic-speaking Christians had been native to Iberia long before the Muslim conquest. The Morisco physicians Alonso del Castillo and Miguel de Luna read and translated them. Pedro de Castro y Cabeza de Vaca, Archbishop of Granada and later of Seville, defended their authenticity for thirty-three years, founded the Abadía del Sacromonte to house them, and committed his life to their cause. Many of his contemporaries — the Marqués de Estepa, Adán Centurión, the Spanish crown that twice intervened to protect them, generations of Granadan clergy and nobility — were convinced. The Holy See, after eighty-seven years of examination, issued its 1682 ruling against the texts; yet in every generation since, including our own, researchers have re-opened the question: Anastasio Kushner, Spanish, Maghrebi and international scholars have argued, with new philological, codicological and contextual evidence, that the dossier deserves a fresh reading. **This collection takes no side.** It assembles, for the first time in a single open-access library, every facet of the case — the artifacts themselves, the still-undeciphered *Libro Mudo*, the translators' working papers, the Castro and Estepa defense, the Roman process, the Inquisition records, the Maghrebi reception in al-Ḥajarī's *Nāṣir al-Dīn*, the broader Morisco world, and four centuries of scholarship in seven languages — and offers them to historians, philologists, cryptographers and codicologists worldwide. **The Libro Mudo remains unread; the truth of the affair remains contested.** This is a call for the next attempt. — *Fernando Barrejón, Curator*